Wednesday, May 17, 2006

Why does WaPo call her a "Discredited Somali". The fact that she did not tell the entire truth in her petition for asylum had been known for many years, and I wonder how many asylum applications, either here or in Holand, tell the absolute truth?

Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Somali woman who moved to the Netherlands, won a seat in the Dutch parliament and became one of Europe's best-known champions of immigrant and Muslim women's rights, said Tuesday she would give up her seat and leave the country because she is being stripped of citizenship for lying on an asylum application 14 years ago. Hirsi Ali, a harsh critic of Islam and Dutch intolerance toward immigrants, has been negotiating for a position at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington and expects to begin there in September, according to her spokeswoman, Ingrid Pouw.

Good for the AEI

In a statement Tuesday, Hirsi Ali said she was proud that she had "put the oppression of immigrant women -- especially Muslim women -- squarely on the Dutch political agenda." She said she had spoken out against what she called "issues related to Islam," including limits on speech, the murder of women deemed to have brought shame on a family, and the religion's failure to condemn genital mutilation.

And as a result caused her to receive death threats.

She came to international prominence in 2004 for writing the screenplay for "Submission," a short film that outraged many Muslims and prompted an Islamic radical to kill its director, Theo van Gogh. The film featured four women, wearing see-through robes with words from the Koran scribbled on their bodies, who claimed to have been abused by their Muslim husbands. Hirsi Ali's outspokenness and celebrity made her a high-profile target of complaint in the Netherlands, both from Muslims and anti-immigrant figures.

The reason the anti-immigrant people are agains her is because they have realized the problem with so many Muslim immigrants in their country, and they just want to get rid of all of them.

The target of frequent death threats, she has lived in semi-hiding under armed protection for about four years, conditions that she said contributed to her decision, months in the making, to leave the Netherlands.... "I have said many times that I am not proud that I lied when I sought asylum in the Netherlands," Hirsi Ali said in her statement Tuesday. "I did it because I felt I had no choice. I was frightened that if I simply said I was fleeing a forced marriage, I would be sent back to my family. And I was frightened that if I gave my real name, my clan would hunt me down and find me." "The allegations that I willingly married my distant cousin, and was present at the wedding ceremony, are simply untrue," she said of the television documentary. "I refused to attend the formal ceremony, and I was married regardless."